Is Traditional dating only a antiquity frenzy?

October 6, 2008

A building on a weak foundation can go only so high.The problem with the 'mainstream' line of thought - which is consists of mostly non-natives as the primary thought-leaders - is that they fail to understand the intricacies and nuances of the various information sources they choose to look at. Not to mention that they have merely scratched the surface, if at all! A PhD here and another there isn't good enough.

This is not to say that they are (or might be) wrong - but that they are too adamant, and can stoop to very low levels to vilify whoever disagrees. That's downright dishonesty - since they _claim_ to be scientific but their behaviour betrays some hidden agenda.

But _at the same time_ - it does not help when people oppose them not on a case-by-case, logical basis, but only for the sake of opposing since their _beliefs_ are something else. Any kind of science can not work solely on beliefs (we need to start with some axioms though) - every inference needs to be justifiable and falsifiable. Unfortunately, for exactly this reason, history can not be completely brought under the purview of science. Science can certainly help, though. Archaeology (and historical records), genetics and language studies need to agree to increase our level of confidence in a hypothesis (as put by a friend, quoting a well-respected academician I can not remember the name of...)

In my limited exposure to 'scholarly' debates - I do see many open questions being discussed - unfortunately, not in very academic tones. Citing of weak academic (or otherwise) works in support of one's arguments means that those discussions are bound to fail and go haywire!

My 2 paise.regards,RavindraOn Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 10:34 PM, kishore patnaik <kishorepatnaik09 wrote:

Dear all, Recently, one western Scholar, who fancies dating Rgveda as late as possible, said the traditional dating a la Sethna is " antiquity frenzy " The present accepted dating of Indian History mostly flows from identification of Sandrocottus with Chandragupta Maurya. But, independent of this, the Rg Veda and other scriptures are dated very late, if possible be, to 900 bce and Brahmanas to somewhere just before the accepted date of Buddha.

Inspite of hectic activity and onset of most modern technology, you have not seen too much of radical texts being written in the last 200 years, inspite of the rise of new sciences such as Nuclear Physics, Electronics, Bio Technology and so on in sciences and Linguistics, sociology and Psychology in Socios. I am not talking of the volumes but the content.

If this be the case, I can not see how it is possible that not only a huge corpus of Texts were authored, spread all over Ancient India and beyond , recesioned(spell check) and finally arranged in merely 500 years.

Rgveda itself is a layered document. It has grown over hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. Then it is followed by several other scirptures, most of them not available to us today. Even the texts such as those of Buddhists, Jains, Secular Nyaya Sastras must have taken centuries to grow, especially since we know scores of authors, distanced by hundreds of kilometers across the country, referring to the earlier authors and writing volumes of follow up texts or commentaries. All these are naturally to be placed later to the Indian Scriptures and obviously, it must have taken several centuries to write these texts.

Coming to historical age of Ancient India, there are more confusions than are answered. Not a single king is correctly identified without arriving at a contradiction. For eg., I can go on and on about the dating of Satavahanas - they being mentioned in several places without being dates. So little said about them. So long as you try to connect them to the Puranic lists, you are always confused, leading you to say the puranic lists are contrived and " muddled' But the truth is you are trying to fix Mahatma Gandhi into the dates of Rahul Gandhi, just because the names look similiar.

If the future historians work out just as we are doing today, I won;'t be surprized if they identify Rahul Gandhi with Rajiv Gandhi , just as they did Sandrokryptos with Sandrocottus!!!!!The mainstream thinkers can not write a single line against the traditional chronology, issue based. Sweepstake statements such as this is trash or antiquity frenzy or unsubstantiaed all remain what they are - genralized, biased and yes, unsubstantiated!

best regards, Kishore patnaik